Is democracy for White people? Looking back on the spring of 2020, when the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor were fresh in our minds, author Theodore R. Johnson understands why folks might think so.
He recalls the troubling, familiar dynamic around the political expression that sprung up in reaction to these deaths: “As the protests continued across the country, we risked getting tripped up, once again, on arguments about how people protest rather than why. The destruction of property becomes more concerning than human rights violations.” And yet, Johnson also points out, we instinctively know that this is a distortion. In his terms, “even our myths tell us this is wrong.”
As Johnson writes in his new book “If We Are Brave,” “Nearly 250 years after Massachusetts colonists destroyed private property by dumping the contents of a British East India Company shipment into the Boston Harbor, no one gives a damn about the tea. But the principle inspiring that protest—‘No taxation without representation’—lives on. The nation’s capital, still a Black city, wears this badge of protest on its license plates.” And yet, a fight for freedom and democracy is not what most Americans conjure when they see Black folks marching in the streets. There is far less, if any, grace.
So how do Black Americans confront these double standards and still love our country? That’s a paradox Johnson has wrestled with for years, with increasing urgency. For the Black former U.S. Navy commander, who served for 20 years before becoming a speechwriter to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that disparity rankles Johnson’s soul.
But as a student of political behavior, with a PhD in public policy, Johnson is well-equipped to parse these conundrums of race. Today Johnson is a contributing opinion writer for The Washington Post, a highly-sought expert on Black electoral politics, and one of the smartest voices on Black politics. While his debut “When the Stars Begin to Fall” was an analytical, academic exploration of Black patriotism and national identity, his deeply personal second book, “If We Are Brave: Essays from Black Americana,” explores Black citizenship and American democracy from the perspective of a son of the South, and a Gen-Xer who came of age during the ascendance of hip-hop.
In “If We Are Brave,” Johnson seeks to help readers understand the ways race confounds us today, and navigate the fissures that surround us. He firmly encourages Black ownership of the country and democracy. His arguments are grounded in years of research, while also rooted in personal experience within major White institutions like the U.S. military and academia as a Black boy from North Carolina who learned to hold his own among the male elders in family gatherings. Drawing on canonical Black writers from James Baldwin and Langston Hughes to rapper Nas for inspiration, this book is a truth-telling letter to America that blends harsh reality and loving appreciation.
In a recent conversation with The Emancipator, Johnson talked about why he felt a sense of urgency in writing about race and democracy and argued that despite former president Donald Trump’s infamous reputation, there are good reasons to expect cracks in Black solidarity at the ballot box in November.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Carole V Bell: You liken If We Are Brave to a kind of rap session, or a repast which is more a sacred space. What audience did you have in mind as you wrote and who do you want to read this?
Theodore Johnson: For the voice, the audience is primarily Black people, without a doubt. I wrote this mostly in the way that we spoke growing up, or at least in the way Black writers that we read — the way they wrote. I tried to write in that same storytelling way that essayists have, as much as preachers at the Black church have.
But the issues I tackle are national issues. So my sense is that this will be a Black book, by a Black author about Black people, about what Black people do, say, or think. But a lot of times, especially the way race operates here, White folks don’t want to have conversations about race. So the book is a window into the Black experience that they would probably never get otherwise. It’s not quite like having them sit in a barber shop on a Saturday afternoon, but it comes from the same conversations happening among Black people about Black people in our country that others probably haven’t been privy to. At least not in this essayistic prism, and one that speaks to the current moment.
Does that mean that you’re conscious of speaking to White America, or are you just letting them listen in on your conversation with Black America?
I’m conscious that White America is listening. And I want them to. This isn’t [so-called] ‘family business, and I don’t want White folks to know.’ This is a sort of meditation on race in America by some dude who’s been in the barbershop too long, and a White person walks in. So the conversation doesn’t change, but the audience is considered for sure.
What sparked this contemplation of race and democracy? What made you want to write this book now?
It started in the fall of ‘21 winter of ‘22, and my first book [“When the Stars Began to Fall”] had come out. I’d done a ton of research for it. It walks the nation through the way race and identity interact, and what can be done about it to improve our democracy. But parts of it felt like a textbook, like I was presenting too much of my work, like I was building a case instead of trying to explain a phenomenon.
This book is all essays. The voice is different because I wanted the research to come alive. I wanted the arguments [from a lot of other people in other places] to have a face, a story, a background, a setting, feelings and emotions, and essays felt like the right way to do that. So instead of pulling from political science research or public opinion polls, here it’s more autoethnographic. [I’m] trying to make big, complex, complicated ideas and concepts feel relatable by making them human-sized.
Each essay does essentially that, whether it’s from making a case for democracy in the first chapter, to police brutality, affirmative action, tangling with ideas of twoness, and double consciousness from Dubois [in the rest]. The country will turn 250 years old in 2026. I have an essay on how race has factored in each of the country’s 50-year anniversaries. So it’s not singular in its focus, except that it is specific to the way race influences how I view some of the issues the nation has.
Your book takes us from Reconstruction to the election of Trump. With so much change happening, how does this help us understand where we are now? I learned from your earlier research that one of the things that held the Black electorate together historically was the belief in African Americans’ linked fate and aversion to overt racism in the GOP. That has not ebbed with Trump, but he is making inroads. So is racism no longer a deal breaker?
Young Black folks tend to be more progressive than older Black folks generally. But young Black men, though, seem to have more of an appetite for conservative ideology; more than young Black women or Black women writ large. The other thing common among young Black voters, and young voters in general, is a lack of faith in democracy; that voting is going to make a difference in your life. So when you combine a lack of faith in democracy with this sense that maybe you aren’t being listened to, or that your vote doesn’t matter, then linked fate loses its power. Like linked fate, electoral solidarity is only powerful if we all agree that democracy is the way to create change and that voting together is the best way to bring that change about.
If we don’t believe democracy is the greatest way to change, if it’s protest, or if it’s small businesses or whatever folks believe, then we don’t believe that democracy can deliver on our aims. Then linked fate seems to lose some of its strength and lose some of its grip, and sends folks out looking for other answers or other approaches.
Even a demonstrable racist?
But racism seems everywhere. I have a vignette in the book about people campaigning for Barack Obama in central Pennsylvania, and another about when Kamala Harris was announced as Joe Biden’s running mate in 2020. In the Obama instance, a person campaigning goes to this [White] household and knocks on the door and says, ‘We’re here from the Obama campaign.’ He asks if they know who they’re going to vote for. And the woman turns around and screams to her house, to her husband, ‘Hey, hon, who we voting for?’ And he says, ‘The nigger.’
That story comes back to campaign headquarters. They’re voting for the Black guy, but they clearly hold animus toward Black people.
And so, if you’re a young Black male in America you’re hearing Obama talked about this way. You see even the people that vote for him talk that way, and the White folks that vote for Biden/Harris talk this way. And then you have Trump saying Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs, and Mexicans are rapists and drug dealers, but he’s promising a good economy, and that the government is going to leave you alone.
They’re going to leave you alone if they’re doing mass deportation?
One in 5 Black men and 2 in 3 White men find that argument attractive enough to vote for the guy [Trump]. And that’s why linked fate doesn’t hold all Black voters in. Because linked fate doesn’t fix racism. Linked fate is a political strategy to win elections and hopefully get some policy demands delivered, but it doesn’t mean that you belong in America. And not belonging and having low faith in democracy can mean that you might be willing to take a chance with your vote — to allow the people who are known for [openly] saying nasty things about you to try to do things differently [policy-wise] than the people who say nasty things about you more discreetly.
So [as this line of thinking goes] ‘If everyone’s gonna say nasty things about me and me partnering with other Black folks doesn’t deliver the change because we’re still struggling here, then I’m just gonna do me and I like the way this guy talks about people not taking my job or giving money to businesses. He hangs out with people I like or respect, or athletes or celebrities. I like that he’s hypermasculine and doesn’t take shit off anyone.’ That becomes a political influence as much as a social or cultural commentary on a person’s views, and linked fate doesn’t constrain all of that behavior.
Trump is hypermasculine?
Trump’s masculinity isn’t about strength or even vigor. It’s about ‘he gets away with everything.’ And there’s something very James Bondish almost about never getting caught or never having comeuppance. There’s a masculine power to being untouchable. He has 34 felony convictions and may be president in a month. I have family that have two felony convictions and will never vote for the rest of their lives by order of the state. So there is a masculine component to no one — not even the government — being able to check you.
You’ve talked about working within a hallowed tradition of African American essayists. Who are some of those authors that you admire and learned from?
Dubois is certainly easily the biggest influence from that [earlier] period. Dubois, Zora Neale Hurston, and then, later on, Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Langston Hughes’ poetry, for sure. But even more contemporarily, folks like Tressie McMillan Cottom and Imani Perry and Eddie Glaude, and Clint Smith. I think all those voices, to one degree or another, reflect the way I like to talk about the world around me. So when I get stuck, or when I feel like maybe this is almost too personal to have meaning, I read some of the essays from those folks or their poems and realize there is a way of showing how the personal can be political, and what that can mean for broader societies or understanding big, complicated frameworks.
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